This is my second post in the last month on Bryce Harper. The first one examined how Harper has achieved his historic season. If you would like to read it, here is the article.This post also has several GIFs, so grab a Coke and smile to give them a second to load.Clicking on the videos opens them in a new window if you would like to go through them. Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of taking in a game at Nationals Park. The Baltimore Orioles were in town, and there were actually more Orioles fans than Nats faithful. Oh well. I was able to get a lot of footage on Bryce Harper. Unfortunately he didn’t get much to hit, going 0-1 with three walks. Still, I got a lot of video on Harper so let’s go through it and see what we can learn from the soon to be NL MVP.On Deck Warm-up Take a look at what Harper does to get ready for an at-bat.

Sometimes we can glean a lot from the on-deck process, sometimes hitters are just getting loose. I would say Harper is more of the latter. Harper throws on a bat weight, does some movements to wake-up his body, then is pretty much ready to hit. We can get a little bit of his thought process by looking at this clip.

Hmm… Looks like Harper is thinking push with the hands or knob to the ball. But Harper says don’t chop down on the ball! What gives? Plenty has been made about how pro hitters don’t do what they say or practice how the actually swing or whatever. I’m not going to get into that. I’ve never talked hitting with Harper, so I can only speculate on his thought process. But to me, this is Harper basically keeping things simple. “Get the handle through, put the barrel on the ball.” Harper is about to dig in against live big league pitching. Now isn’t the time to be thinking about swing thoughts. “Supinate the top forearm while internally rotating this and …” Nope. Barrel on the ball. Barrel on the ball. (Again, my interpretation.) An astute observer would even notice that Harper swings a bat with a heavy weight on the end. Studies have shown that doing so does not increase bat speed and may even harm it in the near term. So is Harper stupid? I don’t think so. If swinging a heavy bat a few times gives Harper the feeling of a quicker bat, then maybe the few hundredths of a mph in lost bat speed is worth it for the mental boost. Maybe swinging the weighted bat helps him to keep his big swing under control. Whatever the reason, I didn’t feel compelled to fold the research paper into an airplane and fly it his way. For one at-bat of the night, Harper did do one timed take with the pitcher, shown below. Some hitters start the “at-bat” much earlier with lots of on-deck takes. Harper chooses not to, it is a free country. My guess is Harper’s warm-up is more relaxed and locks in the focus as he enters the box. Each hitter only has so much mental focus, so find something that you feel comfortable with and stick with it.

Takes Since Harper didn’t get much to swing at, I did get to capture a lot of swing takes. Thanks to Bobby Tewksbary, takes have become really popular to look at. Looking at takes isn’t my idea of a Friday night, but I do feel we can get a tidbit or two from them. Let’s start with a take that Harper had very little intent of swinging, a 3-0 pitch.Take #1

Yep, pretty boring. But let’s make some notes on his stride. Starting with his stance, we can see Harper starts relaxed, nearly upright, with the bat on his shoulder. Some instructors believe the stance is critical, some believe the stance doesn’t matter at all. I’m somewhere in between. I don’t see anything out of the ordinary, so Harper gets a check in stance box from me. From the stance, Harper moves into his gather which is where the fun starts. Below is the move I am talking about.

We can see Harper REALLY gets into the rear hip keeping his torso aligned toward the pitcher. Harper really sits down with a good hip hinge and even some posterior pelvic tilt. He gets LOW. I’m talking T-Pain low. We can’t see much of the tops of his thighs. Why does Harper do this? Well, for one Harper can. Harper is athletic enough to get into this position and move within it. Two, getting this much hip flexion sets up hip extension, the strongest movement in the body. Harper is getting ready to unleash some force. Third, Harper (like most LH hitters) sees the vast majority of his pitches low-and-away. So why not give yourself a better chance and get down there a bit?

You may be thinking “What about high and inside? I would just bust him inside!” Well…

Yeah, Harper has the bat speed to turn that pitch around in a hurry. And if the pitch tails back a little bit over the plate you are on SportsCenter’s Top Ten – in a bad way. More on this in a moment, let’s look at the rest of his stride.

I went into serious detail about Harper’s stride last time, so will just gloss over it quickly here. We see him get a strong drive through the rear hip bringing his entire body forward. Fairly late he gets some lead hip coil with some internal rotation. Notice on this take, he doesn’t open his lead leg/foot much at all. Harper lands closed with the pelvis closed. More on this later. We also see Harper stays low as he moves out to foot-plant. (By the way, this philosophy of get-low-to-take-away-the-outside-pitch-yet-still-turn-on-inside-fastballs is something we see with another high caliber hitter, Andrew McCutchen.) Last thing I want to point out is Harper’s patience in his load. Lately I have been talking about the barrel’s ABC positions. A is the stance, B is the gather, and C is end-of-stride. We don’t want to get to C too soon, because then we get to D position. And D stands for doo-doo. Take a look at this slideshow of Harper and others demonstrating patience with the barrel load.

Take #2 OK. I think we said about as much as you can possibly say on a pitch that Harper had zero intent on swinging at. Let’s play another one where he was a little more down the swing process.

A little more exciting, but not much. We can see a couple differences from the previous take. One, Harper opens the lower leg/foot more as he puts the lead foot down to allow the pelvis to start opening. This is interesting in that we can see Harper’s thought process. Harper doesn’t stride to have his foot open at a certain angle. Rather Harper’s swing opens the lead hip, opening the lead foot in the stride. If he doesn’t start his swing, he strides closed. Once again, Harper’s SWING dictates his lead foot’s orientation. We can see to put the brakes on the swing Harper quits his shoulder turn and drags the rear foot – stalling hip extension. The handle harmlessly falls forward without the barrel moving much at all. If you are a fan of takes, you might notice Harper’s take is a little different than some of the other ones you may have seen, like this one of Jose Bautista.

Bautista has more of top hand or rear arm swing, getting the barrel moving behind him early and flattening the swing path. Harper doesn’t do this, instead choosing to come in more steep and release the barrel later in the swing. There are pros and cons to each method, and if you would like more info on this you can find it here in my Swing Plane Series. (Mr. Harper makes several appearances.)Swing Finally! Like I said, Harper didn’t get much to swing at and only put one ball into play. But what am I going to do, not write a post about it? No way! Let’s get cracking. Here it is! In what will soon become the most critiqued short fly ball to right-center of all-time.

Dang. Harper just got under the pitch or this baby would have found the right field bleachers. Comparing this swing to Take #2, we have a hard time telling the two apart pretty far into the swing.

A few frames later, they start to diverge. See if you can pick out the differences. (Hint: look at the lead shoulder.)

And another few frames.

Pretty obvious. The shoulder turn is bringing the handle to the hitting zone. Harper’s lead hip extension is locking out his front leg and rotating his pelvis. Notice how Harper is really holding on the angle of the bat, bottom forearm, and top forearm. Typical of bottom handers, Harper is releasing the barrel later in the swing. Finally at contact. Tons of shoulder turn, tons of hip extension.

You may notice Harper had to raise his head level a little bit in the full swing. As we saw before, Harper “cheats” a little for the down-and-away pitches, forcing him to make adjustments to higher offerings. Plenty of successful hitters do the same including Griffey, Cano, and McCutchen.

I like bullet point lists, so let’s wrap up these two posts on Bryce Harper with some items of interest about his swing and I will try going a week or two without writing anything about the guy.1.Harper gets low. Bryce Harper really gets into his rear hip and probably has more hip hinge, posterior pelvic tilt than anyone in the game. Harper of course follows this up with probably the most powerful hip extension in the game. Does that mean every hitter should do this? No way. I’m going to be doing another Swing Variable post in the future looking at hip hinge/extension specifically. Plenty of successful hitters stand tall and get to good positions through side bend. But if a hitter has good hip extension, why not set them up to use it? Kinda makes sense to me. (Interestingly, Joey Votto admired this very feature of Harper's swing in this awesome interview with FanGraphs' Eno Sarris. Definitely worth a read.)2.Harper has tremendous shoulder turn. Coupled with the hip extension is Harper’s explosive shoulder turn. We can really see this from the pitcher’s perspective. Harper’s shoulders go from very closed to very open very quickly.

Shoulder turn is a topic I have discussed in much detail, so if you are looking for more info check out my series on shoulder functionhere.3.Harper’s swing opens his stride. We saw the difference in the zero intent take to the swing the difference in the led leg/hip function. On the full take, Harper lands closed. For his swing, his lead hip opening resulted in his foot opening into foot-plant. It may seem like a minor detail but it gives us insight into his swing process.4. Bryce Harper is a competitor. I love watching Harper play baseball. Always have. I love how he tries to send each pitch into orbit, almost insulted the pitcher would dare throw him a strike. Yet if given an opportunity, he will square up and lay down a bunt to help find a way to beat the other team. I think we lose track of the competitive nature of hitting sometimes. But you can tell it is a big part of Harper’s game.You can see all the footage I captured in this YouTube video.

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